Shadows of Ourselves
by ncfan
Summary: -Kakashi x Shizune- Disconnection in one form, or many. Companion to 'Crucify'.


**Characters**: Kakashi, Shizune  
**Summary**: Disconnection in one form, or many. Companion to 'Crucify'.  
**Pairings**: KakaShiz  
**Author's Note**: I have discovered an unexpected love for this pairing. _Getting Scared_ is another oneshot of mine that focuses on Kakashi and Shizune while Tsunade is still in a coma, but this has a different theme. Also, this is a companion to _Crucify_, another KakaShiz, since it references the plot of _Crucify_; I strongly suggest you read that first, since otherwise some of this won't make any sense.  
**Disclaimer**: I don't own Naruto.

* * *

She's not asleep. Neither is he, though he was existing in a state of half-sleep that couldn't come to real sleep thanks to memories and the fears that maybe, maybe the invaders will try to come back while they're sleeping. When Kakashi comes back to full, complete wakefulness, he can hear Shizune breathing next to him, and it's not the soft, steady breathing of one who sleeps.

It's the tight, controlled breathing of one who does not sleep, one who can not sleep.

"Shizune?" Kakashi's voice is terribly quiet and he's all too conscious of how loud it sounds in the complete silence. Will he wake up people in the other tents around? After a moment, he realizes he won't. The only sound is the sound of doused lanterns hanging from clotheslines swinging slightly in the lazy, humming late summer-early autumn breeze, and a dog—possibly one of the Inuzuka ninken—barking in the distance.

There's no answer.

"Shizune?" Kakashi tries again, daring to raise his voice just a decibel. Maybe she'll acknowledge him now, since Kakashi knows that Shizune, skilled kunoichi that she is, has to have heard him the first time. "Are you awake?" It's a rhetorical question, but one he feels obliged to ask out of politeness.

"Yes." She's whispering, just as conscious of the sleeping nin and civilians around them for probably a mile in all directions, and Shizune's voice is apart from the lethargy of doubtless exhaustion (she's been running the makeshift field hospital single-handedly for nearly a week now) consumed by a strange apathy.

Or not so strange.

No one has paid any amount of attention to the fact that the two of them are sharing a tent. Everyone's living in close quarters now, genin cells sleeping in the same tent with their senseis if they don't have any families to go back to (a depressingly common occurrence in any shinobi village) and oftentimes, shinobi who have never met before a day in their lives before have been sleeping on the ground in pallets enclosed under the same four walls.

The only good thing to have come of the Akatsuki's assault on Konoha, Kakashi decides, is that the bonds between shinobi that should have been strong as iron but had been slackening over the years, are finally growing strong again. That sense of solidarity is back.

A swish of breath, like the wind that's making the white canvas above their heads billow like the sails of a ship, fills the small area and Kakashi gets a sick feeling, just for a moment, that aches in his stomach. "What is it?" Shizune asks, still whispering. She turns her head slightly, and Kakashi can make out huge eyes, dark irises and pupils and stark white sclera, in the darkness. Her eyes are opened even wider than they usually are, wider than one who is trying to sleep should have them.

Kakashi lifts a hand to touch her arm lightly, and Shizune jerks away sharply, sitting up briefly to pull sheets that had been kicked away from her body back over it like a shield. She inches away from him just a little bit.

Kakashi can't bring himself not to be hurt by that action. Pushing down that sick feeling that has risen to a higher crescendo, he murmurs, "Are you alright?" He would understand if she's not; Shizune has driven herself to exhaustion dealing with the casualties of the Akatsuki's invasion, caring for an increasing number of those who have gotten sick thanks to the lack of clean drinking water, tending to Tsunade and handling every bit of paperwork that should have been her mistress's had she been conscious (And maybe that, Kakashi muses wryly, is why Shizune wants him to take the position of Hokage so badly, so she doesn't have to deal with the paperwork anymore).

And there's more, beside that.

"Yes, I am." That voice is so limp and lifeless that Kakashi is sure that she's lying now; Shizune's always detested admitting that something, anything is wrong in her life. But he doesn't say anything. He doesn't know what to say.

Kakashi is as ill-equipped to deal with the most mundane problems of another as a newborn. What he knows is wrong is something as far from mundane as anything can be.

That force of breathing coming from her, each breath spaced three seconds away from each other, is as artificial as a plastic mask painted over a flesh face. Kakashi finds himself listening to it, wondering when Shizune's going to broach the topic that both have been terrified to dwell on, but even more terrified at the prospect of never speaking of it, of letting it run to silence until it, like a festering infection, kills them both.

Again.

Death was different than what Kakashi expected it to be. Kakashi always expected a tremendous amount of pain to be accompanied with the act of dying, but just as his heart failed, something changed. The pain pulled back like the sea drawing away at low tide and, if anything, dying was more akin to falling asleep than anything else.

It was not the experience of death that has given him the unsettled feeling among the land of the living.

It was coming back that made everything seem different.

Kakashi understands now. The dead aren't supposed to come back. A soul that has passed beyond the veil should not be wrenched back through.

After having seen death, living is pale and wan and even the sun seems a little darker. The colors are drained from all things, and Kakashi watches as the flow of life drifts from him, a little by each day.

He can now count each heartbeat from when he lives now to when he will die again.

"It was… dark." She's plainly struggling to keep her voice even. And that even voice is brittle and just a little thick. Like she's holding back tears, except Kakashi knows she's not. He doesn't think either one of them have the capacity to cry anymore.

_Kakashi finds peace when dying, but Shizune finds none._

_There is a puppet master tearing her soul from her body, and if Shizune had a voice left she would have screamed while everything was going dark._

_Pein is twisting her soul from her body the way one would strain water from rock. She is being ripped loose and the agony that comes when she finds her soul being lifted from her bones blinds her._

_Beyond that, there is only darkness, and oblivion. _

_An absence of pain that comes like the swift embrace of sleep, promising that no more will come._

"It was dark, in the abyss." Shizune manages to speak more steadily now. Kakashi focuses his eyes on her and sees that she's pushed the sheets away again. She's lying flat on her back, hands twiddling together on her stomach, staring straight up at white canvas sails—no, wait, it's only the ceiling of the tent. "And I could hear… voices, in the mist." Her breathing picks up a little bit. "They all sounded so familiar. Like I knew them from somewhere, but memory had deserted, and wouldn't give me answers. They couldn't hear me. Whenever I cried out to them, they said nothing. They just went on, whispering, and even when it seemed they were just a foot from me, I saw nothing.

"And now, back here again, nothing seems quite the same. I can't explain how." A weak strain of laughter escapes her lips. "It feels like everything around me is a play with actors who speak the words woodenly."

Shizune turns eyes on him, wide open and filled with some urgent emotion that he can't identify. "We shouldn't have come back, should we?" Her voice is barely audible.

Kakashi can only shake his head, and put a hand on her arm again. This time, Shizune doesn't jerk away. "No, I don't think we should have. But I don't think…" Kakashi draws a deep breath "…I don't think we've got any choice in the matter, Shizune."

She sighs deeply, and he can feel her head settling against his shoulder, the cold skin of her pale cheek against the skin of his arm. "Do you still have the nightmares?" Shizune asks suddenly. "The _memories_?" she adds, with intense bitterness.

This provokes a surprised blink from Kakashi. She hasn't asked about that in nearly a year.

Tsukuyomi never goes away. This, they both know.

"The dreams are starting… starting… to get less intense. They started to dissipate around the time Uchiha Itachi died."

"But you still have them?"

Kakashi has only to close his eyes, and he thinks he can feel a katana tickling his ribs, cold steel breathing on his skin.

"Yeah, I do."

"Well…" Kakashi can feel a hand snaking across his chest as they fall back into the position that, when night cloaks the land, has become so familiar for them that Kakashi doesn't even need to think to find the spot on her neck where her heartbeat is most prominently heard. "…Now I have dreams too.

"And we're both disconnected, now. I guess we'll just have to find the wire again."

Kakashi can hear what she says beneath that.

_We are naught but shadows now._


End file.
